Island Studies Journal, 16(1), 2021, 9-22 Notes on an archipelagic ethnography: Ships, seas, and islands of relation in the Indian Ocean Nidhi Mahajan University of California-Santa Cruz, USA [email protected] Abstract: This paper explores a mobile anthropological method, or what I call an archipelagic ethnography. This archipelagic ethnography focuses on relationality to think through not only islandness and archipelagoes—land, ship, and sea—but also considers relationality as a starting point for examining connections across space. Based on over ten years of ethnographic research among dhow sailors in the Indian Ocean, I argue that navigation, social interactions, notions of patronage, and protection alongside memories and histories of mobility draw together these multiple spaces across the Indian Ocean. Moving between dhows docked in port, on islands, and at sea, I elaborate on an archipelagic ethnographic method that is a mode of thinking relationally about different kinds of spaces and places. Taking relationality as a central point in thinking through relations between ship, land, and sea, I hope to think about the notion of society in relational terms as a starting point for an anthropological method that is attuned to both difference and connection. Keywords: anthropology, archipelagic, dhows, Indian Ocean, islands, relationality https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.147 • Received May 2020, accepted October 2020 © Island Studies Journal, 2021 Introduction: Anthropologist on board? A ship is a world unto itself, even if it is docked in port. I tried balancing myself on the narrow thirty-foot plank that led to the Sagar Sanpati, a wooden sailing vessel or dhow, moored at the jetty in Mombasa’s Old Port. Gingerly placing one foot in front of the other, inching forward slowly on the shuddering wooden plank, I turned around to look at Yunus, the dhow’s cook, who was helping me board the vessel for the first time. “Don’t look back, and definitely don’t look down!” he said, the plank shifting in the wind, my dupatta (scarf) flying over my eyes, blinding me. I tottered, almost lost my balance, cursed the fabric, and paused. Against the cook’s advice, I looked at the water rippling forty feet below. Yunus reached out to me and I quickly grabbed his hand. “I’m here, don’t worry,” he said, reassuringly. The captain who was watching from the deck yelled, “You know how to swim, right?” I nodded. “Good, because Yunus doesn’t! If you both go down, rescue him!” The rest of the crew, an audience of ten able seamen, laughed at the absurdity of this slow-moving spectacle. A woman boarding a dhow. That too, an Indian woman in Mombasa. A ship’s cook who can’t swim. I finally reached the end of the plank and lifted myself onto the ladder, the captain reaching out a hand to help me climb on 9 Nidhi Mahajan board, for the first time. “Asalaam aleikum, welcome,” Yusuf, the captain, said as I clumsily landed on the deck, readjusting my dupatta. Behind me, Yunus confidently drew himself up on to the vessel and laughed. An everyday movement for him, was a tightrope act for me. The dhow I had just boarded for the first time was a world whose boundaries were clearly circumscribed, one misstep carrying you from this world unto another. Yet, this seemingly enclosed world was filled with traces of another, more familiar one. The deck smelled industrial, of greasy diesel, suffused with the acrid, pungent smell of dried shark, an odor that wafted through the streets that lay beyond the port. The captain graciously led me to the cabin, instructing Yunus to make me a cup of tea—the code of hospitality not being forgotten even though I could sense Yusuf’s confusion. Who is this woman? How did the port authorities allow her in? And what does she want from us? I sipped on the masala chai that Yusuf offered me in a glass. It tasted just like the masala chai I had grown up drinking in Bombay. Inside the cabin lay a stack of DVDs of the latest Bollywood films. Here were traces of the familiar, in the strange. A ship, a floating space, is a world unto itself, but is always in relation with many others. This essay is an effort to examine the relations that bind ships to islands, and to the sea. I do so by not only tracing itineraries that crisscross across these spaces, but also through relationships, forms of social interaction, and sense memory that draw islands, oceans, and ships together. Focusing on the Indian Ocean, I argue that navigation, social interactions, notions of patronage, and protection alongside memories of histories of mobility draw together these different spaces. In doing so, I elaborate on an ethnographic mode of inquiry that is not only multi-sited, but archipelagic, that is able to simultaneously hold the particularity of spaces whilst drawing them in relation to each other. This archipelagic ethnographic method is a mode of thinking relationally about different kinds of spaces and places, opening pathways for thinking about the notion of society through relational terms as a starting point for methods in the social sciences. To highlight this relationality, in what follows, I share notes from long-term fieldwork that moves from the site of the dhow, or the ship, to different spaces across the Indian Ocean. While many of these sites are islands—islands of navigation, islands of danger, islands of protection, islands as ports of call—what draws them together is not simply their “islandness” but their relation to each other, to dhows, and to the Indian Ocean itself. This relationality is brought into being not only through material connections—of trade or people—but also of memory and histories of mobility across these spaces, an archipelagic ethnographic method being central to viewing these relationalities across ships, sea, and land. Ship, land, and sea in island studies Departing from older tropes of viewing the island as static, isolated, and insular, island studies scholars have looked to the island through the lens of relationality and “thinking with the archipelago” (Baldacchino, 2006; Braithwaite, 1999; DeLoughrey, 2007; Gilssant, 1997; Grydehøj et al., 2020; Pugh, 2013; Stratford, 2003; Stratford et al., 2011). Much of this work has been concerned with seeking out the form that this relationality might take—the assemblages, networks, mobilities, and worlds that islands are embedded in (Clark & Tsai, 2009; Hau’ofa, 2008; Steinberg, 2001). This connectivity and relationality does not “flatten” or take away from the uniqueness or islanded-ness of a space, but in fact accentuates the specific formation of each of these islands as places (Hay, 2006). 10 Island Studies Journal, 16(1), 2021, 9-22 One obvious vector of connection across island spaces is the sea. Island relationality has therefore been situated in the water, as well as through the vessels that move across it (Blum, 2013; Bremner, 2016; Pugh, 2016, 2018). Rather than viewing the seascape as the backdrop against which vessels move, and islands are situated, scholars have centered how the sea is a socially constructed space that shapes island relationality (Pugh, 2018; Steinberg, 2001; Steinberg & Peters, 2015), the concept of “aquapelago” resituating even environmental processes at the center of this relationality (Hayward, 2012). Relationality has emerged as a key concept by which ships, seas, and islands have been thought through. Nevertheless, as Jonathan Pugh (2016) has convincingly argued, although relationality has often been used as a heuristic device, oceans, ships, and islands, have most often been studied in isolation from one another. Bringing together literatures of island studies, ships, and the oceanic turn in the social sciences, he argues that “islands, oceans and ships should not always be reductively conceptualized in isolation, because they are often inextricably interwoven into complex, multifaceted and shifting arrays of relations and assemblages” (Pugh, 2016, p. 1041). In doing so, he turns our attention to Barbados’ Landship, a performance and welfare institution that gestures to the relationality of island, ship, and sea through a dance choreographed to invoke not only the sea, but also past mobilities through ships—whether the voyages of slave ships, the British Navy, or steam ships. For Pugh, the Landship as an institution acts as a metaphor for the relationality between island, sea, and ship, where neither one of these elements disappears into the other, but they each retain their particularity even as they come together. Pugh’s analysis of the Landship provides one avenue for exploring the relations that bind ship, island, and sea; it is a relationality that is performed, that imagines the sea and the ship on land, invoking a Barbadian past in the present. While these relationalities between land, ship, and sea are useful to think with, Pugh’s 2016 study is located on one island, on one performance. Building upon Pugh, how might anthropologists and other social scientists adopt an approach that is able to apprehend this relationality across multiple islands, vessels, and seascapes? What kind of methods can be employed to examine relationality across the sea, between islands, and the vessels that move between them? Building upon concepts like “thinking with the archipelago” (Pugh, 2016), anthropologists Nimführ and Otto (2020) suggest that island relationality be thought through the concept “islandscape.” The term itself was coined by Broodbank (2000, p. 21), who defined islandscape as an approach that situates an island in its connections to other islands, mainlands, and the sea, highlighting its multidimensionality and “human imprint.” Nimführ and Otto (2020) employ “islandscape” to redefine binaries such as isolation/relation and global/local, combining -scape and assemblage thinking in island studies.